Jessica
Marais plays a mobster's wife in the sexy cable series Magic City.
Michael Idato, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Magic City, the sexy US drama that lured Packed to the Rafters star
Jessica Marais from Australia to Hollywood, has finally secured a broadcaster
and an air date in Australia.
Foxtel has bought the series from US cable channel Starz and will
launch it on local TV screens in November on its SoHo channel.
SoHo was recently revamped as a basic cable channel with premium
cable drama content. Its schedule includes the HBO series True Blood and Aaron
Sorkin's critically divisive The
Newsroom.
Magic City is set in Miami in the late 1950s and tells
the story of the inhabitants of the luxurious (but fictional) Miramar Playa
Hotel.
Marais, best known as Rachel Rafter in the top-rating Channel
Seven drama, stars in the series as Lily Diamond, the wife of mobster Ben
Diamond (Danny Huston).
In the opening episodes, Ben Diamond becomes involved with Miramar
Playa's owner, Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
When it launched in the US earlier this year, Magic City met with mixed
reviews, though culture bible Vanity
Fair lavished it with attention because of its period setting and
its luxurious production design.
Miami Herald television critic Glenn Garvin described it
as "irresistible television".
"The Miramar Playa is a gorgeous hotel built on a foundation
of lies, corruption and Mafia money," he wrote.
Garvin also noted it was part of a broader trend:
"Television's recent fascination with a tiny, peculiar slice of US
history: the short interregnum in the late 1950s and early 1960s".
Shows such as the critically acclaimed hit Mad Men, and some less
successful shows such as Pan
Am and The
Playboy Club, have exploited the social mores and distinct style of
the period.
Garvin singled out the show's female leads, including Marais, as
its strongest suit.
"All play trophy women in a pre-feminist world, roles that
could easily have sunk to bimbomania," he writes. "Yet each of them
projects intelligence and frustrated ambition, turning their characters into
much more than sexual pawns in a male world."
The series is filmed on location in Miami. Series creator Mitch
Glazer says the fictional Miramar Playa is inspired by three iconic Miami
hotels of the era - the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc and the Deauville.
The Deauville, now known as the Deauville Beach Resort, is being
used as the Miramar's exterior for filming.
Marais temporarily relocated to the US late last year to film the
first series. Marais and her partner, actor James Stewart, moved permanently to
the US with their baby, Scout, in August.
Her departure from Packed
to the Rafters was part of a minor exodus of the show's younger
stars, who all left the top-rating drama to pursue other opportunities. They
include Zoe Ventura, Jessica McNamee and Hugh Sheridan.
The first series of Magic
City ran for eight episodes on the Starz channel in the US. A
second series of 10 episodes has been commissioned and is being produced for
2013.
